For a long time I kept my views on US policy towards Cuba a secret from my family.

My parents were both born on the island, and I grew up hearing tales of how their families had escaped the newly entrenched regime of Fidel Castro in 1959.

Throughout my childhood — I was born in Florida two decades after Mr Castro assumed power — I especially loved the stories of the underground network run by my maternal grandfather to help his capitalist friends flee to the US in the early 1960s, stories occasionally told to me directly by those same friends. On my father’s side two uncles were Operación Pedro Pan kids, sent to the US on flights with other orphaned children, later to be reunited with their parents and elder siblings.

I am not unusual. The first generation of Cuban-Americans born in the US to that particular class of Cuban émigrés spent its youth inundated with such stories — many true, some doubtless inflated by time and myth. With them also came our anti-Castro indoctrination, which started before we could speak.

When I reached late adolescence, and started shedding my parents’ and grandparents’ beliefs to develop some of my own, I had a hunch that I would find their views all wrong.

But my hunch was wrong because their views were half right. That the Castro regime deserves unqualified condemnation is not a belief that must be exclusively rooted in the emotional trauma of the exile experience. Objective facts point to the same conclusion.

The facts show that Cuba, more than 50 years after La Revolución, has an appalling human rights record, pays its citizens the equivalent of barely more than $20 a month, rations food, restricts property rights severely and threatens political dissidents with jail.

Unabashed leftwing apologists for the Cuban statist model are harder to find now than in the decades immediately following Mr Castro’s assent, though they still exist, most reliably in Hollywood. For example in 2008 the actor Sean Penn interviewed Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and successor as president, for The Nation magazine – and mixed ignorance with obsequiousness into a pungent stew pot of journalistic incompetence.

Pundits and politicians are subtler but often still misguided. Acknowledging Cuba’s poverty, they nonetheless point to its gains in healthcare while failing to note the chronic medicinal shortages and defecting doctors. Or they talk about the country’s high literacy rate, ignoring the repression of a free media and the censorship of internet usage and controversial books. They blame the US embargo and travel restrictions for cutting off Cubans from the world and thus preventing contact with democratic ideas, forgetting the millions of Canadians and Europeans that visit the island each year.

And that is just the left in America — don’t ask me about the dopey hordes wearing Che Guevara T-shirts in the capitals of Europe.

But at least the left, despite its infuriating instinct to romanticise a tragedy, displays a usefully cosmopolitan bent and ultimately arrives at the correct solution for how the US should deal with Cuba: allow travel and trade, hope for the best, but expect nothing and move on. After all, relative to Cuba, how much attention does the US give to the domestic politics of, say, the Dominican Republic?

The right has the reverse problem: accurately depicting a hateful regime but stubbornly clinging to a policy whose inefficacy — either in weakening the same regime or improving the average Cuban’s lot — is beyond doubt.

Where I part ways with the right and with my family’s earlier generations — hey, I said they were only half right — is in my opposition to the embargo and the general isolation of Cuba. I have less to say about the right’s obstinacy than about the left’s inanities, but only because a more obvious rebuttal needs fewer words.

If surveys are right, many Cuban-Americans of my generation find themselves in my same position: no love for the Castros or the leftwing view that romanticises them; no love for isolationist policy and the rightwing view that embraces it; but lots of love for a colourful family that I never wanted to upset at the dinner table by revealing my anti-embargo apostasy.

For all my immense familial pride, I simply find it strange that Cuba remains a focal point of American foreign policy. During a week in which the Russian rouble collapsed and North Korean hackers stared down the American film industry, the dominant headlines were about US dealings with an impoverished, non-threatening country of 11m people.

A good enough reason to normalise diplomacy is that the issue should cease to matter. And selfishly I would like one less topic to awkwardly avoid when I visit family in the holidays.

During a tense moment of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, I came across a funny quote saying that the Greek parliament had underground tunnels through which members could escape if protesters were to enter the building.

The original story was posted on a Greek-language website, and a writer who I thought was normally sensible had vouched for it on his own site, written in English. It was late in the day when I saw the quote, and I lazily chucked it up on Alphaville. I didn't try too hard to test its veracity.

And, of course, it was bullshit. There are no tunnels.

Within the next few hours, a familiar crowd of Greece watchers raked me over the coals on Twitter and in the comments section of my post. I deserved it, and I realized how stupid I'd been. I updated the post and apologized quickly.

My story isn't perfectly analogous to that of Jessica Pressler, the New York Magazine writer who was just fooled by a high school student claiming to have earned enormous sums of money through trading. The story she accepted from the student was admittedly less believable and more consequential for those involved, and certainly it was read by many more people. Mine was just a much smaller deal.

Still, watching her get slammed so aggressively on social media has reminded me of my own mistake and how I felt for days after it happened. And now Romanesko is asking Bloomberg whether the company will withdraw the job offer it just gave her. Other outlets are asking too.

Everyone fucks up, but when a journalist fucks up, a lot of people know about it soon after the mistake is first uncovered. That's as it should be. But I want to emphasize that this is also one of a journalist's worst nightmares. I would guess it's the third-worst, only after being outted as a fabricator (first) or a plagiarist (second).

But fabrication and plagiarism are sins of commission that require calculation and deceit. When a fabricator or a plagiarist gets caught, the readers can never know afterwards whether the journalist is truly sorry for the transgression, or merely for having been busted.

Getting scammed by a lying source when the reporter is honestly trying to get the story right is different. (I hedge this because of extraordinary cases like the Rolling Stone rape story, in which more serious questions about the reporter's sincerity and conduct have been raised. I don't see the New York Mag piece as comparable, whether in the gravity of the subject matter, the potential reverberations of the mistake, or the behaviour of the writer.)

Please don't get me wrong: there's no excuse for it. Spotting deception is part of a journalist's job. But this failing shouldn't automatically designate the journalist as damaged goods. Like crashing a car because you glanced away at the wrong moment, the mistake is still your fault, but it can happen when you're rushed and not paying attention.

Not that it can necessarily happen to anyone, a common defense that I actually don't buy. Some people are such natural bullshit-detectors that they'll never get scammed. Others are obsessively careful. But it can happen to an awful lot of people, and unlike fabricating or plagiarizing, such a failure -- again, if it's the first time -- should be judiciously weighed against the journalist's body of work.

I don't really know Pressler, though I've met her a couple of times at events with mutual acquaintances. But I'd happily wager that she is especially unlikely to get fooled again anytime soon. This kind of experience would leave a mark on most journalists, and there's a good chance it will stay with her for a while.

Speaking for myself, two wonderful things came of my own brief moment of disgrace.

The first is that the mistake left a searing humiliation lodged in my brain, long after everyone forgot about the post -- and it makes me cautious every time something that seems too good to be true, or "too good to check", comes along.

The second is that I befriended a fellow journalist named Matina Stevis. A graduate student at the time, Matina is now a spectacular reporter for the Wall Street Journal, based in Nairobi. She is also Greek, and the way she treated me after I posted the silly quote is what I consider the ideal template for how journalistic peers (and the public) should respond to this kind of mistake.

Like others on Twitter, Matina first expressed annoyance and astonishment that a writer at the FT would be so gullible. But after I apologized, she emailed me to offer sympathy for my having been duped by the Greece hysteria, noting that widespread misinformation had become a problem for a lot of foreign journalists who didn't speak Greek. And she said that if I had any questions about what was happening, I should email her for help.

I wrote back to thank her and to say how dumb I felt. "I'll be glad to help. Chin up :)", she responded.

We had a drink when she was next in New York, and now each time one of us visits the other's city, we hang out. She's the best. I've never told her this -- getting fooled was really embarrassing and I never wanted to talk about it-- but I've always been so grateful for the grace she showed me precisely when I felt like such a moron, and without letting me off the hook for the error.

I've never forgotten it.

And I wish everyone would act this way towards Pressler: aggressively pointing out the mistake; demanding an instant retraction and official apology; but then showing compassion afterwards.

Because in Pressler's case, we already know that she very much is not a dipshit. She has done some fantastic pieces through the years, and is clearly a talented journalist and writer.

I'm not trying to lecture anyone here. This is just how I wish everything worked.

Getting fooled is a big mistake in journalism, but I hope that Pressler doesn't lose her job offer because of this episode.

She screwed up, as did the other involved editorial staffers at New York Magazine. Sometimes there need to be consequences beyond a public shaming, but in this case I think it's punishment enough.

I'm using this post as a placeholder to keep myself organized, and inclusion on the list is not an endorsement, etc... Some of the titles below came from Diane Coyle's excellent list and the rest from scrounging around.

Kenworthy and Deaton look at much of the same evidence on the distoring influence of income inequality on the political process, with Kenworthy emerging more skeptical (though Deaton acknowledges that there is much uncertainty about the size of the influence):

Inequality was surely the economic theme of 2013, its status enshrined late in the year in discourses by Barack Obama and by the earthly representative of an even Higher Power.

I had considered entering the recent blogospheric debate on inequality's appropriate place in the hierarchy of political priorities, but frankly I just ran out of gas before going on holiday. (And bloggers are nothing when not full of gas -- har.)

So instead I'm passing along the most memorable passage on the topic that I've come across lately. It's from Angus Deaton's excellent The Great Escape, which I just finished and warmly recommend (I've embedded links to the studies and books referenced in the excerpt and footnotes):

I spoke on a panel with Allison Schrager of The Economist and Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider at the Kauffman Economics Bloggers Forum. Below is a revised draft of my prepared notes, and many thanks to Brad DeLong for the invitation.

“High society in Tampa is a strip club with a cover charge,” quipped a magazine editor on Twitter. The line is funny but it also inspires a vague resentment, probably because it is based on misconceptions both about high society and about Tampa, my home town. I’ve heard many similar jokes this year and, at the risk of seeming churlish, I needn’t bother asking if the joke-tellers have actually spent much time here.

Please have a look at a podcast we launched over on FT Alphaville a couple of weeks ago. Hosted by yours truly, it's a long interview about the Chinese economic model with Peking University finance professor (and indie record-label owner) Michael Pettis.